


Wherein Lavellan Dies

by Feynite



Series: Looking Glass Alternate Universe Madness [2]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Looking Glass
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 16:43:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6528007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feynite/pseuds/Feynite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Looking Glass AU prompt fills centred around the scenario where Lavellan died instead of Solas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Lavellan Dies

**Author's Note:**

> Moving some AU's that I had in a large singular collection fic to their own categories now that I've got so many with so many instalments, so please bear with me if any oddities/double-posts/etc occur. Also, thanks to everyone who commented on chapters of the original fic that might get deleted now that I'm re-organizing things! Your words mean /a lot/ to me, and I still greatly appreciate them and really wish I could find a way to stick 'em onto the new postings. Blame my poor organizational skills.

“I did not want this,” he whispers. “I did not mean for this. It should not be this way. Please, please, please…”

“Vhenan,” she says.

He falls silent. As shocked as if she’d slapped him.

“The world is ruined. No one cares about your intentions anymore,” she tells him, softly. Her voice rasps with dryness and dust. The words hurt. Her wounds are bleeding, and will run out of blood sooner rather than later. Her patience is gone. There’s no point in any of it anymore. He’s made himself a monster, and still she loves him, as she always knew she would.

“I should have killed you,” she says.

“You should have,” he agrees.

“I never could.”

“It’s what I would have done, in your place.”

She finds she can think of nothing to say to that.

Her wounds spasm and she cringes on it, clutching herself a moment as the black spots eat up her vision. She sways, a little, but the moment for her end isn’t quite at hand yet.

Still. The air is getting thinner, and her legs are cold as ice. It won’t be long, now, until she sees what death has to offer. Mercy, she hopes. At this point she would gladly take pity, as well. But if the trends of her life have been any indication, it will likely offer neither.

They sit in silence until she recovers. Words have failed him. Of course they have; there are precious few for times like these. She doesn’t know of many people who have faced the end of everything together.

“Just out of curiosity, what was supposed to happen?” she wonders. There is a strip of light on the horizon. It would be a lie to call it anything approaching ‘sunlight’, but it doesn’t burn quite as angrily as all the rest of it.

“Does it matter now?” he asks.

“It’s one last question for you to answer,” she replies.

His eyes find hers.

“When the Veil came down, time should have become inconsequential,” he explains. “I planned to revert the world to the state it had been in before Mythal died. It would have been a moment of burning chaos, and then over in the blink of an eye. Your future would never exist. You would never exist. As painless an end as possible; the denial of a beginning.”

Tears run tracks through the blood and dust on his cheeks. She’s amazed he even has any left. Hers are all long spent.

“It didn’t work,” she notes.

“No,” he agrees.

“Why not?”

The wind howls over them.

“I can’t say,” he admits. “The existence of the Veil changed so much about the world. I thought I had grasped the differences. Apparently, I missed more than I ever imagined.”

“I’m shocked.”

It’s his turn to laugh inappropriately, then, though soon enough he is back to weeping. The air around them trembles. The light on the horizon grows, like an angry dawn. Like a serpent rising up to eat the sky.

Solas stills.

He turns, and looks, and suddenly there’s just the faintest glimmer of something in his gaze.

“What?” she wonders.

There’s no possible way things just got worse, is there? If there’s a bottom below this one, she doesn’t want to find it.

Solas gets that look on his face, though. One that makes her feel centuries younger, like they’re back in Skyhold and he’s just had some brilliant epiphany, and all the pieces of a puzzle have fallen into place. His fingers even twitch, the way they do when he wants to cast a spell or pick up a quill or find a paint brush.

“What new horrible thing is happening now?” she presses.

“It’s a fold,” he says.

She considers that sentence. Allows it to sink in a bit.

“Was that supposed to make sense?” she finally asks.

He turns to her, a thousand conflicting things dancing in his eyes.

“It worked after all, in some fashion,” he rasps. “That is the point where time has turned back. If we can reach the opening before it collapses, we can salvage something from this mess.”

Ah.

Well.

Better something than nothing, in the end.

Her cracked lips split in a pained and painful smile.

“I guess you succeeded after all,” she says.

“Come with me,” he asks.

Finally, finally, the fool wants her to go with him. She laughs. Shakes. Looks to the pool of blood spreading like a banner behind her.

“It’s sweet that you think I can even stand,” she tells him.

There is a moment of silence.

At last, she slumps against his side.

“Go. Live well in your new, old world,” she asks.

He hesitates, a moment. His hand comes up, and cradles the side of her face. He lets out a breath so heavy that she sags further, and slips, and he catches her, closing his arms around her. It hurts; but she will let him hold her, one last time.

“I will never forget you,” he assures her again. Swears it; it is all he can offer her now, she knows, and he offers it as if in prayer that it might somehow, in some small way, give her comfort.

It does.

Just a little.

He will live. That’s a strange comfort, too, all things considered.

“Go,” she tells him again.

He presses a kiss to her lips. Tears - his - drop onto her cheeks.

“I will not let you die alone,” he says, shaking. But that fold of his won’t last forever, and she doesn’t want to see if it gives out before she does.

“Then you will have to send me off, ma vhenan,” she whispers.

His arms tremble and her body aches, and he is too weak for the mercy of spells, the ease and cleanliness of magic. He draws a small knife from his belt, and he shakes, shakes like a leaf as he presses the blade to her.

She closes her eyes; waits.

He cannot cut.

The knife slips, scratches, but goes no deeper.

She lets out a breath.

“I think you were lying, when you said you would have done it,” she tells him.

“I am sorry,” he whispers. “I am sorry, I am sorry, I am so, so sorry. Ar lath ma, vhenan.”

They are out of time; and if the last thing she can do is ensure that her terrible failure is not also his, then that is what she will do.

“Go,” she says.

Then she presses the blade in herself.


	2. Soul Scavenging

He stares at the creature before him. 

Cold. He feels cold. Cold as he did in the first moment when he stumbled back to this time, and the world felt  _right_ , felt  _familiar_  again; and a wave of grief flooded into the air, so potent it drove even Mythal’s contingent back, wary of what wretched thing they may have found.

Nothing that screams of grief so strongly could bring anything but curse. They had not drawn close enough to see him, and he is glad; gone is the time when he would have retaken his place among them.

He has come to investigate this Titan. Alone. The one which once killed Mythal and which Mythal once killed; infested by the mystery of the Blight. The one which owns another version of the silvery heart beating power into his veins.

Down the Deep Roads he has crept, solitary and secret. He must solve this mystery; must reach some kind of equilibrium for the world.

And then he may stop.

At last, he may stop.

But his stolen heartbeat has led him to this chamber, insistent and demanding, and now a spectre stands before him. Wearing a face that fills him with shock, at first; and then the cold, and then finally, a deep and brittle outrage.

“How dare you,” he says.

She stares at him.

“Do you think you can manipulate me by taking her form?”

The image shudders; red lyrium bled into silvery light. The form struggles, as if losing itself. Even as only an image, seeing her suffering, again…  _again_ …

He clenches his hand into a fist before he can give in, and reach for her.

“Solas,” she says.

“Stop,” he demands.

“Solas, I don’t know how long I can stay,” she says.

It makes him pause.

More manipulation, he is certain, but… to what end?

“What do you want?” he asks.

“I had to try,” she tells him. “The darkness. I reached… but I couldn’t remember. But I couldn’t forget. I saw you, and… and I pulled through. But it’s so hard to hold onto. I don’t… I don’t know how to explain it, exactly. But we are not gone.”

“What?” he asks, and the ice in his veins begins to change from outrage to dread.

“There is nowhere and nothing, but souls can’t become nothing. It presses down. We can’t stop screaming,” she says. “I think… the Titan is trying to let us out, but we can’t remember. Until you came, I couldn’t remember.”

No.

No, that future doesn’t exist. It was undone before it could be made. It’s gone.

But what about that which cannot be destroyed, cannot be unmade?

Realization crashes into him with numbing dread.

The spectre closes her eyes, and then seems to regroup herself.

“It’s hard to focus,” she admits. “It’s… I’m not sure what’s happening, really. But we’re not gone like you thought we would be. There’s nowhere else for us to go, though. We’re trapped. I think it’s breaking something. I think… I think I know what the Blight is. Someone, somewhere, must have done it before. Gone back in time.”

No.

No, no, no.

He stares, and she stares back at him.

“The Titan is trying to help, but we’re driving it mad, somehow.”

No.

She hangs her head.

“You have to finish it, ma vhenan. I don’t know how, but you have to find a way to finish destroying us, before we destroy your world.”

It’s her. It’s really her. And he… 

He has done this.

All of this.

“I cannot,” he says; the words slip out, quiet and broken.

She steps forward, and curls ghostly hands around his face.

It will never cease to amaze him, that she can love him so, even now. All he has done, and still she touches him like he is something precious. Like he deserves that comfort, when he has brought only utter ruination to her.

To everything, it seems.

He had thought, at least, she could be free of suffering. That perhaps someday she would be born again, in a world he had made kinder for her. If only fate were merciful.

But she is suffering, still.

The cry which escapes him is a wretched sound as he grasps her, and pulls her tight to him. His doubts are gone. It is her; painful and unwanted as this truth is, he will never forget her, nor fail to know her, when it comes to it.

“No,” he says. “No. I will not destroy you. Not again. I cannot do it again!”

She holds him, form fading in and out of his grasp. The veins of red glow, and she sighs, and sinks in around him.

“Vhenan. I do not wish to suffer any longer,” she tells him.

He shudders; cracks, again, until the pain is so bad that he can only turn numb.

Destroy them all, once more?

Destroy her?

Destroy her very  _soul?_

_“No.”  
_

“Please.”

He leans back, and feels wild and frayed and desperate beyond what he had even thought possible. His own emotions snap into air around them; volatile and fierce where they press against the lyrium-encrusted walls. It is too much. Too much, and he  _will not_  be the destroyer again.

“I will save you,” he promises.

“How?” she asks him, ruefully.

The song is calling him; the light of her is calling him. This world he has restored is his, but he does not remember, any more, what was so vital about its restoration. He should have left things be. If she had not loved him, she would have defeated him. She might have defeated this, too. Saved her world from a darkness he could not divine the cause of.

Because of course, the cause was he.

He can feel her, there. A presence in the air before him. 

His vhenan.

His heart.

Like the stolen heart beating in his chest.

There. That is the answer; that is what he must attempt.

“Do not be afraid,” he tells her, and then he reaches; pulls at the essence of her with his own power. Silvery threads that wrap about her, tangle with her form as it is sinks into his skin.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Rescuing you,” he replies.

Then he drags her into the hollows of the battered Titan’s heart inside of him. An embrace, closer than any intimacy, and she is within it.

Within him.

 _Oh_ , she whispers; a hum of soft thought.

It works. All things considered, he is almost surprised that it has; that some far-fetched thing he has attempted has not, as yet, resulted in immediate disaster. He has drawn her into a safe place, and there he can keep her until a body can be made.

The heart will have to go with her. Power likely safer in her hands than his.

 _This will not work for us all,_  she thinks, and he feels her grief; her pain for those still suffering.

“I know. We will find a way to help them, too,” he promises her. The Titan may yet have answers. Others may as well.

It is a nightmare, and he is filled with remorse.

And even so, at the faint touch of her thoughts, his heart swells.

There must be a solution. He will not rest until it is found.

Somehow, that prospect seems just a little less daunting now.


	3. On Haninan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From a prompt requesting Solas' POV on Haninan.

He has made many sacrifices over the years, in his efforts to look at the larger picture.

Too many.

His old friend is restored, like many others, but it is different in this case. Seeing him again, Solas suddenly finds his mind turns to every friend he has ever killed. Ever been forced to order into a fatal conflict. To abandon. To execute.

Haninan was the first to die by his own hand.

 _I will remember,_  he had thought at the time.  _I will remember that I did this; I will not forget._  He killed someone who did not deserve death. Someone who still had much to offer the world, but someone who could have and would have utterly undone his plans.

And yet, seeing vhenan speak with him, he realizes how much he had forgotten about him. Not his abilities, nor his insights; but little things, like his admiration for nature, and the way he tells stories, and how he stares down a problem like an artist looking at a canvas.

He had never thought to wonder if his heart would get along with his old friend. They had seemed worlds apart; old and young, ageless and mortal, one possessed of untold secrets, the other driven to work with less knowledge than ever seemed fair. 

But then he listens to them, speaking of clans and legends, of old tales and mysteries, and it is almost as if time has wrapped itself in a circle again; the far future tying more neatly to the distant past than he would ever expect.

Than he could have ever let himself see.

Haninan looks at him, pieces all clicking together.

 _I forgot_ , he thinks; and is shamed.


	4. Disdain

He sees her stare at works of great beauty and artistry. At palaces once-ruined, restored to their former glory. At wonders the likes of which could never be seen in her world, and her eyes are hard, and her lips curl downwards, and she walks the way she did in Halamshiral; surrounded by treachery and pointless excess. Disdainful and unimpressed.

His world has never been perfect. He has always known that. And her resentment is understandable, of course.

Yet he finds himself scrambling to show her things that she will not despise.

Things that will prove that this is a better world, in many ways, than the one she left behind. If only she can let herself  _see_  it. The People face hardships in this time, but they do not starve. The seasons tread gently, and time flows slowly, and magic is everywhere. It is in her, now, as well. He half expects to see her feelings come spilling out last, traces in the air. Freed.

They stay where they are, though.

He thinks, perhaps, of showing her Arlathan.

His younger self looks at him as if he is a fool.

“She will  _hate_  Arlathan,” Pride asserts.

For a moment, he tries to argue the point.  _He_  knows her best, after all, and he knows that she is Dalish; that her people revered Arlathan, held it high as the pinnacle of elvhen society. That there are factors and complexities that his younger self could never hope to appreciate, actively at play in all of this. That he could show her parts of it that his younger self has never seen, the places where people live and breathe with brightness and sincerity.

Then he is forced to concede.

Arlathan is beauty, immortal and glittering, a gemstone where impossible things are built at great cost to those who might be exploited for them.

She will hate Arlathan.

 _He_  hates Arlathan.

He finds her in one of the palace gardens. Staring at flowers made of ice and fire, and trees of woven glass, and he tries to see it through her eyes. Pretty, of course. Impressive, when one has the knowledge of magical crafts to appreciate the difficulty of such things, even in this time.

Hollow. Empty. Just lovely things, and ‘things’ cannot possibly make up for lives lost. For suffering. For the deaths of people who survived so much, and fought so hard.

He wants to tell her that he did not restore this world for pretty things. That he sees her walk among his people, and hears what they call her – maimed, soulless, ugly, broken. That they are misjudging her based on poor understanding, as he once did; that he learned better, and so shall they.

Or at least, so shall some of them.

The weariness when she counters their assessments leaves him feeling cold, however. She is never surprised. The argument sounds tired enough to make him wonder, in facing the People who survived to her time, and aided him, how often was she forced to make it?

“I keep trying,” she tells him.

He pauses, and his gut twists at the look on her face; no longer disdainful. Instead, for a moment, it is simply… lost.

“I know it’s a better world, in some ways. But… I can’t see it,” she admits, quietly.

Not for the first time, he wonders at his own bias. He wonders if, in waking to a world so removed from his own, he could not hope to see it as equally valid to the one he lost, regardless of the truth. All he could see was failure; was suffering. The ruin his own actions had brought. Even the modern people, severed from themselves and their former greatness, had seemed to agree, as they revered the past and lamented its loss.

But she is here, now, as displaced from her world as he had once been from his, and the look in her eyes is one he recognizes all too well.

Like a mirror.

“I am sorry,” he says.

Her expression twists. Hardens.

“You do not get to be  _sorry,”_  she snaps at him. He feels it, too; the bite of her anger, buried in her, contained but whole.

She steps towards him, halts when she is in front of him.

“You don’t get to sacrifice everything and then turn around and be  _sorry_  that you can’t show me why it was worth it!” she hisses. “This petty, stupid,  _pretty_  world, full of petty, stupid,  _pretty_  people, flitting around like bored pets. Pampered and brushed at the sides of the spoiled children supposedly leading them. Oh, but to restore our immortality! Our precious clouds of emotion flitting about the air! Oh, but to restore the  _fucking ice sculptures_ , let’s just  _slaughter our own descendants!”_

She is shaking, eyes bright, filled with accusation and pain and none of it is wrong.

None of it is wrong.

His remorse fills the garden; his eyes sting, but he will not weep.

She might comfort him, if he did, and he does not deserve that. Not now. Not in this, when she is more than entitled to her fury.

When  _she_  needs comfort.

He hesitates. Wishes there was someone more appropriate who could offer it to her; someone less conflicting for her. For an instant he almost laments that his younger self is not present. Pride may be a disaster in the making, but at the least, he has not already done her harm. Right now, that would matter.

She sucks in a ragged breath, and he cannot reserve himself any more.

He pulls her to him.

There are no words. There is nothing he can offer save the apologies she does not want; nothing he can say that would not be an attempt at defending the indefensible.

She is tense in his arms, stiff and still, trembling in her pain and in her anger, until she finally cracks.

Her arm clutches him, and she buries her face into his shoulder, and sobs.

Wretched, ugly things, that shake violently through her as she curls her hand into the back of his tunic and holds him like a vice, like she is trying to keep him near, and ask for help, and break him in half all at once.

When she finally subsides, her breaths are ragged and tired. He grip on him eases, some, and she smooths her touch over the fabric she crumpled. His shoulder is soaked.

“How much longer do we have to stay here for?” she asks him.

“We can leave now, if you would like,” he tells her.

She sighs.

“Realistically,” she insists.

“A few more weeks,” he replies. “Then we may go back to the wilderness, for a time.”

She nods against him, once, and makes no move to pull back.

He keeps his arms around her, as if they will do her any good.

 _I am sorry,_  he thinks.

The words don’t pass his lips.


	5. Rage

Anger suits her.

He recalls the first time he noticed this. Dealing with the conflicts in the Hinterlands. Her uncertainty and fear, and the vague twinge of nausea that had been about her since her waking had, in the wilderness, gradually given way. And anger had replaced it.

His own rage tends to be brief, when it does not simmer for long ages. His younger self wears it in fits and flashes of frustration; whereas he has learned to temper it, to whittle down the length of time it lasts, or to drag it out, stretching it over the long rush of years until it thins, and snaps. 

His vhenan slides into anger as if it is a suit, always waiting for her. Rage. She is a storm when she does it; a mirror to the spirit before her, but not blinded by the emotion, even though it narrows her sight. Everything about her becomes sharp, becomes focused, becomes  _ruthless._

And yet. Not even ruthless past reason.

He is hardly surprised that this spirit of Rage is so drawn to her. Already it is reshaping itself, gaining ever more complexity as it reads the nuances of her anger.

A glance towards his younger self reveals that Pride is staring, transfixed and flushed, lips slightly parted; watching as her form twists and counters, thin clothing stretched over taught muscles, movements cutting and precise. Determined and unyielding.

Yes, he thinks, in rare agreement.

It is  _very_  arousing.


End file.
